We’re now into day four of the latest media-driven debate: Was Barack Obama “elitist” last Friday in talking about small town Pennsylvanians in front of Chardonnay sipping, brie-snacking San Franciscans? Wolf Blitzer, backed by his “best political team in television”(!) is still pacing about “The Situation Room” in search of an answer. The polls in Pa. are ambiguous, he tells us. Some put Obama only a few points behind.

But wait, what is the national impact? Hillary and John McCain are on the attack. Hillary has a new TV ad, with a few select Pennsylvanians saying how offended they are that Barack would say they “cling” to guns and religion because they’re “bitter” over the state's economic woes. McCain says Obama must be “out of touch.” Legions of out-of-state spin doctors and media meisters are in their respective war rooms, doubtless sipping wine themselves, trying to figure out how they can keep this “issue” alive in the days leading up to next Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary. Stay tuned for more serious discussion of the issues!
Such is the state of Election 2008 that after countless debates, speeches, position papers, town hall meetings, and press conferences that the three remaining candidates have said all they can possibly say, and the media have reported about all they can possibly think of. All that's left is to wait for events — be they slips of the tongue, polls or (finally!) the elections themselves. So much for reporting.
In San Francisco, where I write from now, the gotcha quote may have come at a fundraiser at this house, Gordon and Ann Getty's, far from the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. Between sips of Chardonnay, or so one is led to imagine, one of the wealthy assembled asked Obama why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters. To which he replied:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The SF Chronicle tells us that blogger Mayhill Fowler got in, carrying a concealed MP3. The rest, as they say, is history — because it certainly isn't journalism, nor is it policy analysis.

Apart from the superficiality of this “issue,” the circumstances of the fundraiser in a wealthy West Coast community may tell us more about our failure as Americans to connect with each other, than an errant quote that is alleged to divide us.

I for one, as a former small-town Pennsylvanian and current San Franciscan, don't see a contradiction between Iron City Beer and Mondavi Cabernet. Both go well with cheese. And the price of both is going up. And that gets my attention whether I’m in Pittsburg, California or Pittsburgh, Pa. It's time for those promoting this story to crawl out of the newsroom bunkers and campaign war rooms and talk about some real issues.